“I see a role for specialized knowledge, but I think that it's important for there to be an arena where it is shared, where it is communicated. It's not that somebody shouldn't have specialized knowledge. The ability to dig a trench and lay a cable is a kind of specialized knowledge. Farmers have specialized knowledge, too. The question is: what sort of knowledge is privileged in our societies? I don't think that a CEO is more valuable to society and ought to be paid ten million dollars a year, while farmers and laborers starve.The range of what is valued has become so extreme that one lot of people have captured it and left three-quarters of the world to live in unthinkable poverty, because their work is not valued. What would happen if the sweepers of the city went on strike or the sewage system didn't work? A CEO wouldn't be able to deal with his own shit.”

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About Arundhati Roy

Indian author and political activist

Arundhati Roy is an Indian author and political activist. She is best known for her novel The God of Small Things, published in 1997, which won the Booker Prize for Fiction that year and became the biggest-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. Her work and public life have also been shaped by her activism on human rights and environmental issues. In 2024, she won the PEN Pinter Prize from English PEN, and she chose the imprisoned British-Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah as the Writer of Courage with whom to share the award.

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Books by Arundhati Roy

The God of Small Things

1997

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Field Notes on Democracy

2010

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Things that can and cannot be said

2016

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The End of Imagination

2019

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Walking with the comrades

2012

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